Many companies and other organizations operate computer networks that interconnect numerous computing systems to support their operations, such as with the computing systems being co-located (e.g., as part of a local network) or instead located in multiple distinct geographical locations (e.g., connected via one or more private or public intermediate networks). For example, data centers housing significant numbers of interconnected computing systems have become commonplace, such as private data centers that are operated by and on behalf of a single organization, and public data centers that are operated by entities as businesses to provide computing resources to customers. Some public data center operators provide network access, power, and secure installation facilities for hardware owned by various customers, while other public data center operators provide “full service” facilities that also include hardware resources made available for use by their customers.
The advent of virtualization technologies for commodity hardware has provided benefits with respect to managing large-scale computing resources for many customers with diverse needs, allowing various computing resources to be efficiently and securely shared by multiple customers. For example, virtualization technologies may allow a single physical computing machine to be shared among multiple users by providing each user with one or more virtual machines hosted by the single physical computing machine. Similarly, a single physical storage device may be used to store data items of several different customers, e.g., in respective virtualized storage containers.
Some service providers have built sophisticated multi-tenant database services (as well as other types of multi-tenant storage services) using virtualized storage nodes as building blocks. By distributing the data of a given customer across multiple storage nodes, storing the data of multiple customers on a given storage node, and distributing the storage nodes across multiple physical data centers, very high levels of data durability and availability may be supported at such multi-tenant services. While multi-tenancy (the sharing of physical resources among multiple customers) may help increase overall resource utilization levels from the perspective of a service provider, some storage application users may prefer to access at least a subset of their data in single-tenant mode. Furthermore, some of the durability and availability features of the multi-tenant storage services may not necessarily be required for all versions of the data sets of some storage applications, especially if tradeoffs are possible between those features and enhanced performance levels.
While embodiments are described herein by way of example for several embodiments and illustrative drawings, those skilled in the art will recognize that embodiments are not limited to the embodiments or drawings described. It should be understood, that the drawings and detailed description thereto are not intended to limit embodiments to the particular form disclosed, but on the contrary, the intention is to cover all modifications, equivalents and alternatives falling within the spirit and scope as defined by the appended claims. The headings used herein are for organizational purposes only and are not meant to be used to limit the scope of the description or the claims. As used throughout this application, the word “may” is used in a permissive sense (i.e., meaning having the potential to), rather than the mandatory sense (i.e., meaning must). Similarly, the words “include,” “including,” and “includes” mean including, but not limited to. When used in the claims, the term “or” is used as an inclusive or and not as an exclusive or. For example, the phrase “at least one of x, y, or z” means any one of x, y, and z, as well as any combination thereof.